Companies from the oil and gas industry succeed in legal dispute with Heuking Kühn Lüer Wojtek

In more than five years of litigation, Dr. Lothar Ende and Dr. Sebastian Jungemeyer, both from the business law firm Heuking Kühn Lüer Wojtek’s Hamburg office, successfully represented the German subsidiary of a global company from the oil and gas industry across two court instances (value in dispute about EUR 1.8 million).

The dispute was triggered by an accident in a deep well serving the development and use of geothermal energy. In May 2015, the competent Regional Court ruled on the legal classification of a contractor’s support services in connection with deep drilling. The ruling is of key importance for future contracts in geothermal energy and the question of who is to provide evidence of a service provider’s alleged duty violations in a dispute and their causality for losses incurred. The Regional Court judgment was confirmed by the competent Higher Regional Court in January 2016. There will be no appeal to the Federal Court of Justice.

Dr. Lothar Ende and Dr. Sebastian Jungemeyer have advised companies in the oil, gas, and geothermal energy sectors for years on drafting contracts and are representing their interests before courts and arbitration tribunals.

"Now that the Regional Court's judgment has been confirmed, there is finally clarity about how contractual duties in deep drilling are to be legally classified and which party bears the risk if, as is often the case in deep drilling, it cannot be conclusively determined what had caused an accident. This is of great importance for the companies involved and for the hopefully positive development of electricity and heat generation from geothermal energy," said Jungemeyer.